The cheetah creature power suit is more realistic than you think, in more ways than one…
- Cheetah Anxiety
Cheetahs get their food stolen from them by lions, hyenas, and leopards frequently enough that they get anxious whenever they make a kill. If approached by one of those competitors, they'll abandon their kill immediately rather than risk a fight.
Cheetahs in captivity can sometimes develop anxiety so severe it prevents them from eating and mating. To combat this, many zoos have taken to giving their cheetahs "emotional support dogs".
So when the honey badger growled at cheetah-Martin, and his suit's instincts caused him to panic and run away without even thinking about it, that's pretty accurate. (There's a really good comic and fic by @yes-asil about Martin having a cheetah anxiety attack, and they're really good, you should totally read them → Cheetah Panic fanfic and Cheetah Panic comic)
According to this website on mutant cheetahs, "A spotless cheetah or golden cheetah was photographed in Kenya in 2011. It had the black "eyeliner" markings on the face, but instead of a spotted coat it had a pale sandy coat (akin to a puma) with freckles confined to the dorsal area. This is a colour morph, due either to a new mutation or to an existing recessive gene mutation carried in the local cheetah population."
When the cheetah creature power suit was activated for the first time, the spots didn't appear on the suit right away. This early suit that lacked spots is not necessarily inaccurate on its own, as it is possible (though extremely rare) for a cheetah to be virtually spotless.
According to that same website, "The Moghul Emperor of India, Jahangir, recorded having a white cheetah presented to him in 1608", and this is how he described it: "Its spots which are (usually) black, were of a blue colour, and the whiteness of the body was also inclined to bluishness."
"Jahangir refs to the cheetah as white, rather than albino, and the description sounds like a chinchilla mutation, where the spots appear silvery-blue on a pale silvery/bluish background. There seems to be no other information about this creature (perhaps further information exists, but has not been translated), though it has been hypothesised that Raja Bir Singh Deo acquired it in the jungles of his Bundelkhand home region.
The bluish colour, and the whiteness of the body, which also inclined to blue-ishness indicates the chinchilla mutation which restricts the amount of pigment on the hair shaft. Although the spots would have been formed of black pigment, the less dense pigmentation (it does not go all the way to the root of the hair) would have produced a hazy, bluish effect."
These "blue" cheetahs can also be called "maltese cheetahs", with "maltese" meaning "slate grey".
Here's a sketch from the website:
So all of this is to say…
…Martin being a blue cheetah is not completely unrealistic either.
4. The results of the cheetah's Genetic Diversity (or lack thereof)
According to The Cheetah Conservation Fund, "During the last Ice Age, cheetah numbers collapsed to only a small group of survivors. This population bottleneck caused a dramatic loss of genetic diversity, leaving today’s cheetahs unusually uniform." (In other words, all cheetahs are severely inbred.)
This has resulted in many health problems and physical deformities, one of which is having a kinked tail…
…Well… it's scientifically accurate all right…
So anyway, those are just a few fun facts about cheetahs. This was fun, and I learned quite a bit in doing the research for this.
